Comment by tptacek

> The actual PBS and NPR shows you're familiar with are generally developed and produced privately

Off the top of my head, two programs I watch that get CPB funding include: Frontline https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/about-us/our-funders/ NOVA https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/funders/

This is one place some sorta "trickle down" economics worked. CPB contributed to developing the content on PBS. Now PBS either has to cut costs by either canceling programs or ordering cheaper content that corporate sponsors like, run more pledge drives, or seek more corporate sponsors. None of those are appealing to me.

Also CPB helps keep rural stations open means all the niche local productions about state history or geology or whatever can happen.

It's a cut to the already strained budget of a wonderful resource. I'd be surprised if there weren't lost jobs and less quality as a result.

Edit to add: Just sentimental but I'll miss hearing "this program was made possible by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions from viewers like you!"

PBS stations in major markets will likely be able to carry on due to donations and corporate underwriting, but stations in rural areas (the types of places where Internet streaming is less viable due to poor infrastructure) will be heavily affected. Some rural stations get up to half their budgets from the CPB, and these cuts will likely make them have to shut down. In heavily rural states like West Virginia, Alaska, New Mexico, and Montana, the average public media station relies on CPB funding for over 30% of its budget. All of those stations are now at risk. More information: https://current.org/2025/04/heres-how-much-public-media-reli...

> because you almost certainly weren't watching those shows on linear television anyways.

I'm just one person, but I definitely am watching the local PBS over an antenna, and so do several members of my family (living in different households).

The local broadcast is excellent quality, I get a good signal to it, never any glitches, and I enjoy the local news and other programming too.

This is useful, though it leaves open the question of what it means in practice that the grant-making organization is disappearing.

CPB doesn't create programming. But they do write grants to the stations that purchase the programming. Isn't that just funding the creation of the programming with several steps in between?

> The actual PBS and NPR shows you're familiar with are generally developed and produced privately, and then purchased by local PBS stations

Purchased using funds from CPB. Most of the grants went to stations, not content producers. But pulling funds from stations will in fact harm the content producers too.

Given that CBP is only 15% of PBS funding, I’m surprised they don’t start a national fundraising campaign instead.

I’d happily donate some cash to keep PBS’s lights on in red states.

Here's a summary of the changes and the impact: https://democracy.diy/issues/save-pbs-and-npr/

The PBS budget has been cut by 15%, and the NPR budget by 1%. That's not enough to end either one at the national level. However, local stations depend on the CPB funding for 50% or more of their budgets. (Local stations provide local disaster alert systems and local programming.) There will definitely be local station closures and major cutbacks in the stations that survive. Large metropolitan areas will be the least affected. PBS and NPR will continue at the national level, as before.

The funding cuts are the result of an executive order that Trump issued on May 1, ordering the immediate cessation of all federal funding. Similar executive orders have been found to be illegal in federal court. (Congress had already guaranteed funding for CPB from 2025-2027, and only congress can take that money away.)

However, congress supported Trump a short while later (on July 24) by passing the Rescissions Act, which officially (and legally) ended all funding for CPB. And that's the reason for the current crisis: all federal funding for CPB is ending by the end of this year, which is only a few months away.

PBS doesn’t make PBS content either. They acquire it from people who make it using CPB money, among others. Then the stations that don’t make the content license it from PBS, mainly using CPB money. And they use it to attract members/donors.

You’ve framed this as if the disappearance of CPB and its money is basically a big nothing-burger, which is extremely far from the truth.

Source: I work in the system at a level with visibility into these things.

> and then purchased by local PBS stations

If those stations go off the air, who is buying that content?

It's like arguing it doesn't matter if the stream dries up the plants don't get water from the stream, the plants get the water from the ground. Where did that water in the ground come from? The stream!

You're right, these shows aren't going off the air tomorrow. But this does affect the funding for the shows produced by PBS and NPR.

Maybe you weren't watching them on the TV but your grandma was most likely was.

The more important thing is that this is just another tiny step in the death spiral of the United States. Sad to watch.

You may be right, but I'm guessing the Administration is not done with NPR and PBS yet. This is just phase I.

not something one gets to say very often, but you're insufficiently cynical, tptacek.

killing this means cutting of swathes of simple, orderly funding. what remains is donations etc, which is far less regular, and requires work to get, and is also easily attackable by presidential fiat.

we already know there's a bunch of actual lunatics in charge of the federal government, with a very wide variety of very stupid hobby horses. they get to ride them now and then, so how about some guesses at future trips:

- IRS starts going after big non-profit donors to public broadcasters, claiming they're in breach of some somewhat arbitrary and subjective rule that's been poorly enforced in the past, I don't know foundation disbursement rate or something, but also nudge nudge wink wink, if you stopped giving to PBS, maybe we'd forget about it

- FEC "clarifies" that promoting non-traditional-sexuality or whatever is political and thus it's illegal for non-profits to fund it, which of course would be an extremely funny turn given how the Right Wing Lunatics Association of America actually couped the country. this could of course be enforced entirely randomly - go after the NPR stations that are loud and annoying, go after the individual donors to them that the regime wants to make an example of.

- Congress passes some law that "clarifies" the purpose of non-profit status or something, to exclude anti-American speech, which is of course a clear abridgment of the 1st amendment, but of course that's fine in 2025 if it targets notional enemies of the regime.

killing this corporation just grants more power to the extremely partisan executive branch and extremely corrupted government and turns ever more of the functioning of the United States in to just expressions of the whims of the supreme leader and his favoured courtiers.

the current deliberate structural destruction of the united states seems underappreciated - every one of these moves turns the country in to more of a Whimocracy and destroys the bedrock of society that let it weather past terrible administrations.

Nixon was a historically horrible president, but the Washington Post fucking took him down. now almost all the big media is owned by Rich Cunts who make a public show of displaying subservience to the Dear Leader.

I mean you kind of made it sound not too bad at all.

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